News + Events

Agarwal to Lead MIT's Open Learning Enterprise

16 March 2012

Professor Anant Agarwal has been named director of a new unit of MIT created to advance MIT’s online-learning initiative, effective immediately, Provost L. Rafael Reif announced today in an e-mail to the MIT community.

Agarwal will soon step down as director of CSAIL to devote himself more fully to the unit with the working title Open Learning Enterprise, Reif said in his e-mail. He will continue to lead CSAIL until a successor is identified by Ian Waitz, dean of the School of Engineering.

“The development of the capabilities needed to make MITx a reality will require substantial ongoing effort,” Reif said. “Professor Agarwal’s initial goals are the rapid organization of the enterprise, the rapid development of a technology platform for online courses and the development of high-quality MITx subjects.”

The launch of the MITx initiative was announced on Dec. 19. The initiative’s prototype course — 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, modeled after an introductory undergraduate course offered by MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science — began on March 5 and will run through June 8. The MITx course, which has enrolled more than 100,000 students, is co-taught by Agarwal.

“I am excited by the challenge of developing a new model of online learning that will enrich the education of students here on campus while making MIT accessible to millions of students around the world,” said Agarwal, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. “I look forward to creating a robust, open-source technology platform to support this endeavor, and am eager to work with my colleagues on the MIT faculty to create content to be hosted on this platform.”

MIT will make the open-learning software available free of cost, so that others — whether other universities or educational institutions such as K-12 school systems — can leverage the same software for their online education offerings. The Institute expects that this learning platform will enhance the experience of its on-campus students, offering online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences.

MIT also expects that MITx will eventually enable a virtual community of millions of learners around the world. MITx will be coupled with an Institute-wide research initiative into online learning that will study how students, whether on campus or part of a virtual community, learn most effectively.